Knowledge Base
Articles, notes from books, quotes, and videos I've found worthwhile. This is my personalized knowledge database. Filter by tag, type, or search to find what you're looking for.
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Article
What really stood out to me was that only 7% on the time spent on Instagram was used viewing content by 'friends'. This clearly explains and indicates the shift social media has made in the last decase - the platforms have transformed from, in my opinion, social media to social marketing. It is now a place to market yourself, become an influencer of sorts, and sell consumer goods. This has me thinking deeper about the larger macroeconomic environment that rewards and incentives this. I ran a test and 14 out of the first 20 posts in my IG newsfeed were either sponsored content or someone I did not know (and this was after unfollowing and being meticulous about who and what I subscribed to). I personally miss the old school social media sites where it was about connection.
"Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from 22% cent to 17% on Facebook, and from 11% to 7% on Instagram"
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Quote
"The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts"
Marcus Aurelius · Roman Emperor & PhilosopherYou would never talk to others the way you talk to yourself. Give yourself grace and focus on what's directly in your control. Release the rest. -
Video
I watched this videos years ago and it really made me rethink my own relationship with alcohol. It made me realize and question the deeper reasons as to why and how a weekend drink became commonplace. I am not a teetotaler, but my relationship with alcohol is now vastly different.
"You're destroying your brain so much that a boring experience or a person that you don't have anything in common with and wouldn't normally like becomes extremely entertaining with you."
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Quote
"The more we value things outside of our control, the less control we have."
Epictetus · Stoic PhilosopherEpictetus was born a slave. In those conditions, there's no choice but to focus internally and on the things that you can directly impact. Everything else is a waste - any additional effort will yield no results. -
Book
“AI works, in many ways, as a co-intelligence. It augments, or potentially replaces, human thinking to dramatic results.”
AI automates the boring, repetitive stuff and augments our creativity and ability to produce at scale. I do not like to believe that AI can or will ever replace human thought. There are certain things I believe should remain 100% human. -
Book
“AI can also learn biases, errors, and falsehoods from data it sees.”
LLMs are autoregressive, next token prediction machines and respond based on their training data. This highlights the importance of having clean, accurate data for training - or else your model will provide incorrect information (hallucinations). -
Book
“Workers who figure out how to make AI useful for their jobs will have a large impact.”
I have personally experienced this over the last 2 years. I believe AI is here to stay and those who learn how to solve real business problems with it will have an advantage in the workplace. -
Book
“The key is to give the LLM some guidance and direction on how to generate outputs that match your expectations and needs, to put it in the right ‘headspace’ to give you interesting and unique answers.”
There are various methods of prompt engineering. I've learned that garbage in = garbage out and that context is king (but not too much) due to the context window. -
Book
“Whatever AI you are using right now is going to be the worst AI you will ever use.”
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Book
“Soon, companies will start to deploy LLMs that are built specifically to optimize ‘engagement’ in the same way that social media timelines are fine-tuned to increase the amount of time you spend on your favorite site.”
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Book
“If we remember that AI is not human, but often works in the way that we would expect humans to act, it helps us avoid getting too bogged down in arguments about ill-defined concepts like sentience.”
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Book
“We need to be realistic about a major weakness which means AI cannot easily be used for mission-critical tasks requiring precision or accuracy.”
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Book
“The implications of having AI write our first drafts (even if we do the work ourselves, which is not a given) are huge. One consequence is that we could lose our creativity and originality.”
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Book
“It will also remove the facade that previously disguised meaningless tasks.”
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Book
“For human nature is such that grief and pain — even if simultaneously suffered — do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to the law of perspective.”
This has me reflecting on the idea of the hedonic treadmill. The idea that individual's level of happiness, after rising or falling in response to positive or negative life events, ultimately tends to move back toward where it was prior to these experiences. -
Book
“Whirl man’s mind around so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”
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Book
“Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
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Book
“Off hours, yes. But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall televisor.”
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Book
“Only if the third necessary thing could be given to us. Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure time to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.”
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Book
“The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.”
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Book
“The most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority.”
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Book
“All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there.”
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Book
“Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day everyday, sleeping its life away.”
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Book
“It is possible to write yourself out of loneliness. Possible, too, to write yourself into being.”
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Book
“I discover that men may be physically the stronger of the sexes but mentally women are tops.”
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Book
“Solitude, when chosen, can feel like such a gift.”
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Book
“Fame had taught Maurice one of its many questionable lessons: that it is possible to perform life for the sake of a good photograph.”
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Book
“It was work for its own sake. Not everything has to be seen.”
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Book
“Measure its success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved.”